thechangelab.com

The Quest For Parts

I come from a family that rarely threw out “broken” stuff. We – or I should say my father – was always bent on fixing whatever it was. Even if it meant – ghast – having to get someone else to repair it. As well, in the quest to save money, we also bought a lot of stuff from Goodwill, fleamarkets and garage sales. Everything from furniture to speakers.

This isn’t to say we were all that poor. Just that, the people of the village they’re from are characterized by a few stereotypes. Living stingy day-to-day and living-it-up on special days. For some reason, the former are the ones that have stuck with me – albeit, a little inconsistently. This has especially been the case, since I have my own family now.

This may also explain why I have a hard time throwing out stuff now – aside from sheer laziness. For example, there was the old stereo with an 8 track player! It was hooked up to the VCR and DVD player to act as a kind of amp. All of it wired together in a mess of speaker cables and plugs. In the end, it began to take up space. Finally, it became fodder for a dumpster, including the ancient detachable ghetto blaster speakers they used. The portable stereo dual deck cassette player they originally came with… I can’t even remember where it is now.

Then there was the time my parents bought their first family Windows PC. Windows95 in all its bitmap colour glory. Well, it came time to decide what to do with the old one. A beige AT monster that ran DOS and Wordstar. I overheard my father calling around to see how much he could sell it for. I don’t think he was really prepared for the responses he got. Ultimately, out it went. However, if he had kept it going until today, he’d probably get a good price for it as a vintage machine on eBay.

So the value of commodities like computers rise and fall. Some fall into utter oblivion. Others, like the Commodore 64 live on supported by a community of users like C64.org or even in production. The point is, value is in the eye of the beholder. Unfortunately, some people try to take advantage of that.

Recently, I was in a near-desperate need to upgrade the PC I’m using to write this article. It had an Asus P2-99 motherboard, with 128MB SDRAM, a slot 1 PII 400 MHz, and an ATI Rage AGP 2x agp card.

Somethings were just starting to take way too long to do. It was like whipping a donkey along a freeway.

The thought of buying and putting together a new machine appealed to me… A LOT. But as cheap as I could budget, it was still too much for me at the time.

I opened my boxes of spare parts and replaced the CPU with a 450 MHz PIII. Yes, a mere 50 MHz can make a difference. The donkey was no longer crying out in pain. The RAM was a whole different issue though. Buy new? Spending over a hundred dollars to max out the memory was not feasible. Settling on used, and not maxing out, I found someone who sold me two sticks of 128MB PC100 SDRAM for 17 dollars in cash. A moment in heaven.

So why did buying new mean spending over a hundred? I’ve noticed that when certain parts near obsolesence, but still have many users who NEED those parts to keep their existing systems going, some businesses take advantage of the situation. On the other hand, it can also be a supply-demand issue. Every year it gets harder and harder to replace or upgrade parts that are no longer “mainstream.”

Consequently, you’re forced to decide if it’s worth the price to fix up the old one, when a new one can look cheaper.

Irrespective of the speed issue, why buy new if the old one is doing everything you want? How much power do you need to play freecell or read email? Why contribute to a landfill?

Of course, there are other reasons to keep the old beyond such reasons. Sometimes, we like to see how far and fast we can make that donkey run.

So the donkey in front of me now is no longer the sad donkey of yore. The creaky PIO Mode CD-ROM was replaced with a new DVD drive (model: LG GDR-8164B). Sitting next to it is a former cold storage fodder external CD-RW (model: HP 8220e / 8230e Uh huh. Two different model numbers printed on the HP label.) Anyway, at its “blazing” 4X burning speed, it does what I need to burn my backups and ISOs.

Finally, it’s plugged into an inherited router (model: Linksys BEFSR41 ver.2 This is back when Linksys was good, before the Cisco buyout.) for a better network connection to my Windows workstation (model: Dell Dimension 2300) with a new DVD burner (model: LGE GSA-H10N). The CRT the Dell came with is for the donkey here. The “blazing” fast workstation has a somewhat recent LCD (model: LG Flatron L1511S)

So the new can be good too, espeically if it can make the old better.

– toshiya